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Sceptre has scooped Nadia Owusu’s award-winning memoir on race identity.
Editorial director Juliet Brook acquired UK and Commonwealth rights to Aftershocks: Dispatches from the Frontlines of Identity from Meredith Kaffel Simonoff at Defiore and Company. Sceptre will publish in hardback and e-book in June 2020 while Simon and Schuster will publish in the US.
Owusu’s memoir follows the writer’s experience from being orphaned in Tanzania at the age of 13. According to the publisher: “Nadia is a woman of many languages, homelands and identities – she grew up in Rome, Dar-es-Salaam, Addis Ababa, Kumasi, Kampala and London. For every new place there was a new home, a new language and a new identity.”
In March 2019, Aftershocks won the Whiting Award, the American prize awarded to emerging writers. Previous award winners have included authors David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen and Elif Batuman.
Brooke said: “Aftershocks is a story of astonishing wit, heartbreak, playfulness and line-by-line brilliance that speaks to all of us about who we are and where we come from. For me, Nadia Owusu does for race identity in Aftershocks what Maggie Nelson does for gender identity in The Argonauts. When the politics of immigration and race are more important than ever, Aftershocks is an urgent contribution to the debate.”
Owusu added: “Many current notions of race, nationality, family, and home are too restrictive. They divide and isolate us. Aftershocks is about my multiracial, multinational, hopscotched life, but it is also about finding more expansive and fluid definitions of identity. I am grateful that Aftershocks will be published by Sceptre, a publisher that shares my commitment to telling complicated and nuanced stories.”
Owusu’s work has appeared in the New York Times, Literary Review and Catapult. She is an associate director at Living Cities, an economic racial justice organisation and currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.